I missed a comment from May from David mentioning motorcycle maintenance evening classes and asking about the Edinburgh area.

It would seem that evening classes mirror the school and college semesters so it is a good idea to keep an eye out for schedules as the summer holidays draw to a close and autumn starts coming in.

Edinburgh Council ran a Motorcycle maintenance evening class in Autumn 2014 from Boroughmuir High School and the new schedule may include similar when posted from 12th August 2015

West Lothian College in Livingston have a basic Motorcycle braking, steering and suspension course starting on 2nd September 2015 and on 3rd February 2016 their course on Motorcycle Electrics take place http://www.west-lothian.ac.uk/courses/basic-motorcycle-Electrical-trasmission

I don't see anything listed in the Borders College prospectus for August 2015.

These are all evening class "adult education" i.e. more recreational than career oriented. There are other day-release and full time courses that are better set up for a career in motorcycle maintenance but you never know!

The situation was that I thought I would bring my SharePoint 2013 up to date with the latest cumulative update, at the time of writing December 2013 as we are still waiting for the issue with SP1 to be remedied.

So the cumulative update ran through fine and apart from a few complaints in the upgrade file to do with PowerPivot, all was well. So I went in to a demo site and got an empty screen with the following: Server Error: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink?LinkID=177673. When you click on that link it takes you to an update deployment page for SharePoint Foundation 2010.

So I checked central administration upgrade status - nothing. And checked the database upgrade status, all fine. So I went with my cavalier-lazy and ran the SharePoint 2013 Products Configuration Wizard. After the usual multi-stage process it completed with no complaints. Checked my site, no joy - same result.

So I had a hunt around and fired up the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell and Test-SPContentDatabase on the content database for my demo site and nothing. So I ran it as administrator and again got nothing. So I tried Upgrade-SPContentDatabase and it helpfully told me that my content database didn't need upgrading.

So I had another hunt around and tried psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force and again got no errors. So I admitted defeat and started hunting through my ULS logs. This threw up interesting errors, the start of which was:

So again I took the lazy approach and fired up SQL Trace on my database and narrowed down the filter to have a Database Name like the content database and ran it up, and assuming it was psconfig related ran that again. The command ran through with no errors reported to the command line and when I stopped the trace and had a look I didn't see anything. And nothing in the ULS log. So I waited. And the same entry appeared again - don't you love asynchronous stuff?

So I was a bit more patient this time - I restarted the trace, and ran psconfig, and waited until the error appeared in ULS. Then stopped the trace and went looking. And there it was, a big long SQL statement running under an account that didn't have sufficient priviledge to create the table. So being a hacker I gave that account dbo priviledge - ran psconfig and after a suitable pause my site is running again.

The interesting bit ? The identity wasn't the application pool identity of the web application, it wasn't the identity of the timer service (Ok I know it wouldn't be, owstimer.exe wasn't owning up in ULS). On my VM it was the identity of the portal web application / community sites. I'm nonplussed but will put it on my "to learn" list.

I had an interesting chat with our Internal IT guys today about a strange behaviour found with the mixture of software versions that inevitably happen. In our case our desktop kit can be bang up to date, i.e. Windows 8 and Office 2013 or in our technical division our consultants love to install the latest and greatest, with quite a few looking at Windows 8.1. Our Intranet runs on SharePoint 2010 as space for hosting is limited and there is a little little bit of the cobbler’s children effect when it comes to making the upgrade.

Since the combination of Windows 8 and Office 2013 came about there have been reports in to our IT guys about a strange effect in SharePoint document libraries. Browsing in IE 10 to SharePoint would open a document in the registered application fine, but when you tried to open another document (or even the same document) you would get an error saying “The document could not be opened for editing. A Microsoft SharePoint Foundation compatible application could not be found to edit the document”.

The theory was that it was 64 bit related, we had all sorts of problems when our technical consultants (remember them earlier?) all installed 64 bit office to run on shiny 64 bit Windows 7. The control that provides the menu to items in document libraries (open documents class add-on) didn’t work in 64 bit IE, or work with 64 bit office. So we all run 32 bit these days.

The thread on the msdn forums also suggested that the June 2013 Cumulative Update for Office 2013 would contain a fix. It does, but unlike SharePoint cumulative updates which come in a nice big file, the June 2013 Cumulative Update for Office 2013 is just a big list of hotfixes which come with individual files. So if you are looking for the official fix (not a registry hack, well not directly) then look at Article ID 2726997

I know it breaks the principle of doing everything from one device but I have two windows 8 mobile phones. One is my own Nokia Lumia 920, and my work phone is a Nokia Lumia 820.

It does mean carrying two phones but I got my own personal number a few years ago during a period that I didn’t have a work mobile phone and have run with the slight inconvenience of having two with me and the resultant bulk and charging issues.

They both synchronise to my work Outlook e-mail, albeit the personal phone is on manual sync whereas the personal phone is on immediate.

This brings me on to the first issue I hit when I got my work Lumia 820, a few months after my personal phone. Windows Phone 8 introduces some great backup facilities and I have successfully used these on my 920 to recover from a hard reset. I was curious however to understand how this relates to the windows account associated with the phone. To get an answer I pinged a tweet to the rather excellent @WinPhoneSupport to ask whether using the same windows account on both phones would cause problems. Once I got the right question phrasing (the joys of the character limits on twitter) I clarified that unless you use different windows accounts then the backup is not seperate. So to keep the text messages etc seperate from work and personal (as you can guess the personal phone has more chatter) in the backups I had to create a new windows account for the work phone.

This caused an immediate organisational issue for me as a newly avid user of OneNote. Since it appeared on my previous Windows Phone 7 HTC Mozart I have used it as my notes and list maker. This hit a bit of a problem with the SkyDrive storage of notebooks. This would be fine for the storage of photographs but I would need to organise my books to split personal and work again. I had this already at Section level but I had only had one (growing daily) note.

Roll on in time and I have finally split the two books and shared them between accounts so I can see them in onenote on both phones, my work laptop connects using the “work” windows account and I have access everywhere. Perfect. I used the method blogged by Donovan Colbert on TechRepublic on “Collaboration made easy with SkyDrive and OneNote”.

I’ve posted the story of how I chose to go to the EICMA show last year, and having got through the turnstiles the plan was to get to the BMW stand as soon as possible to see the new R1200GS. The show is huge and was quite different to our regular fare at the Scottish Bike Show.

As soon as we got in there were folks handing out fisherman’s friends. Yes you read right, and I still can’t quite believe it. If you don’t know these are menthol cough sweets made in Feetwood, Lancashire. And they were handing them out in Milan, Italy…

It was a long long walk to the BMW Motorrad stand through about three halls and by the time we got there the goody bags had run out, but the scale had to be seen to be appreciated. The stand was very large and there were several hundred people there.

The new GS looked excellent (in the ugly GS way) and my favourite would be the one with the satnav integration, the off-road pegs and the rallye seat to give a bit more height. Unfortunately I didn’t have the scoop on seeing the bike as my pal Joe had seen it at the international dealer launch in Cologne a few weeks earlier, but I was to get a slight scoop in that there was one of the few running GSs at the show – in the car part being thrashed by Chris Pfeiffer. Personally it wasn’t until April 2013 that I would get a ride on the new GS, and that would be on knobbly tyres and mainly off road. I’ve since had a brief ride on road and in Dynamic mode the new bike is quite a step up from the previous model – really likes to rev.

I’ve not been to the Birmingham show so I can’t compare scale but EICMA was huge and very busy, MrsL took a rest at one stage and I wandered around a few of the stands and it was great to see the size of the main manufacturers. They were strategically apart in different halls and this meant that I missed Yamaha completely, managing to see BMW (of course), Honda and others like KTM and Triumph. Of course Ducati was well represented, as were the scooter manufacturers. Wandering around I found the World Superbike stand with two guys called Tom Sykes and Carl Fogarty being interviewed – this was quite hilarious with them being interviewed in Italian – think banal on banal interview questions. The crowd loved it.

All the accessory dealers were there, and Touratech had a big stand – I now have their catalogue in Italian!

Huge and busy is how I would sum it up. Out the back was a show by Chris Pfeiffer which was an unexpected result – he was demonstrating on his usual F800R and a new R1200GS, and there was also a supercross stage which was well impressive. All in all there was too much to see in a day – an excellent result.

Like I mentioned before it is a proper trade show, so you will not find anything to buy – it is open to the public but there is a lot of trade networking going on with new model launches and nothing being sold on the stands. If you like to go to Motorcycle shows to see stuff (but perhaps not buy) then I would go.

Further to my previous post here is a shorter summary post on our Itinerary.

How we got there

We flew EasyJet from Edinburgh Airport to Milan Malpensa with one item of hold luggage. The Winter schedule is quite light midweek so watch for this adjustment. In hindsight we would travel with proper full size hand luggage and use that instead to be quicker and save the extra cost.

I bought return tickets for the Malpensa Shuttle from Malpensa to Central Rail Station. You can buy tickets on the EasyJet flight for the same amount of money as online. Almost everyone from the flight caught the shuttle so it is very easy to find if you follow the crowd.

To get to the show from Milan we used the Metro Red Line and used the Porta Venezia station direct to the RHO Fieramilano. There is a special zone ticket for 5 Euro Return. The ticket machines in the station are multilingual and take notes, so simply switch the display to English (or your language of choice). The journey is fairly long but it was great to see the train fill up with people going to a Motorcycle show, fantastic. Again at the RHO Fieramilano follow the crowd; there is a huge underground passageway that takes you from the platform to the entrance to the show.

At the show

The show was very busy when we got there, fortunately I had my ticket already. MrsL was handed a ticket as soon as we found the queue, and streamed to a turnstile specifically for the visiting “Ladies”. This was a bit hard to see in the scrum at the entrance but look for it if it applies. I joined the rest of the males in the big crown going through, as it was busy I sent MrsL through and she had a chat with another visitor from France who had also left her husband to queue up too.

The show is very very big and we literally stumbled on events and parts of the exhibition, we popped out for some fresh air and found Chris Pfeiffer doing a show. We completely missed Jorge Lorenzo on the Yamaha stand. It is a tough call to cover in a day but worth the research. It is a proper trade show so as far as I could see you can’t buy the stuff you see, and in a way it was similar to work trade shows in terms the variety of large and small companies.

Where we stayed

We stayed at the Ibis Milano Centro and I bought the cultural package online to get breakfast. Breakfast was a continental buffet arrangement and it was interesting to try and guess who else was going to the show. The event is that big and there were at least three groups that I reckon were at the show based on their branded clothing. The front desk staff were great in accommodating me by speaking English and very helpful. Unlike British hotels you don’t get tea & coffee making facilities.

In terms of the locale, the bits we used were:

We used the Porta Venezia metro station on the red line. This got us both to the show and to the metro nearest to the start of the City Sightseeing Tour.

The Ice Cream shop we visited was Grom on Corso Buenos Aires. There are a few of these shops around Milan. They have several chocolate flavours.

There is a Supermercato Punto around the corner in Via Lazzaretto which opens late and is great for grabbing supplies.

Where we eat

This was a short stay and on the cheap so don’t expect posh:

The local McDonalds right beside Porta Venezia had the usual expected fare plus a few local twists, and they have an espresso bar which had fantastic tiramisu.

We eat breakfast at the hotel, this was a continental buffet with cold meats, cheeses, croissants and other pastries, fruit juice machines and coffee machines to help yourself to.

We had lunch at brek San Babila which is a middling walk from the Duomo but slightly tricky to find – it is behind the main street and seems to sit in the middle of a parking area. From the Piazza del Duomo follow Corso Vittorio Emanuele II then slight right across to Via Borgogna and it is on the left through a passageway. There are all sorts of different dish types on offer which you pick up then pay for. It can be busy (good sign) but is reasonably priced and there is a big seating area down the stairs.

I’ve been to a few Motorcycle shows over the years. Our local show is the Scottish Motorcycle Show at Ingliston, about 20 minutes drive from the house and tends to be the first weekend in March. Then a few years ago there was a one off show at the SECC in Glasgow, on a smaller scale. Then I’ve also been to a couple of events that the Police have run, the family and I went to a couple of the Cumbria Police events at Carlisle Race Course – they always seemed to do well with their live bands which went down well with MrsL. I struggle to remember the proper name for the event – RoadSafe rings a bell as it was supposed to be a general road safety event, not just bikes. It was a great venue and speaking to a Lancashire Bike Cop who was also an observer for Morecambe IAM got me on to the IAM instead of Rospa. I’ve also been to Durham BikeWise a few times and will be going this year, MrsL likes the atmosphere and the historical centre of Durham has its own charm.

In terms of proper Motorcycle Events since I got a bike and some kit the only reason for going to the Scottish Motorcycle Show was to see a supplier of earplugs to get moulds taken. The ticket price for MrsL and I of £24 in advance (+ fees) or £31 on the door seemed a bit steep to me, and I’d rather put the money to the bike to keep it on the road or put it towards a meal for me and MrsL. There was also an element of the same old for each visit.

I considered the national show at Birmingham, but again costs of travel and accommodation plus admission fees put me off. And for some reason Birmingham didn’t quite appeal to MrsL as a destination.

Then I read a two page spread in BiKE magazine suggesting things to do – one of these was to attend the EICMA show in Italy. They claimed Milan was well served by Budget Airlines. So I checked, and indeed EasyJet had a direct flight from Edinburgh Airport (next door to Ingliston) to Milan Malpensa. Total flight cost for the trip would be around £133 for MrsL and I, and for some reason Milan was more appealing as a destination for MrsL. It was beginning to shape up, especially as the cost of flights was about the same or less as Birmingham or London would be. And being the great people that they are, the Italian show organisers have what they call a “Ladies Day” on a Friday – women get in free! And the ticket price was 12 Euro – less than the Scottish Scottish show and for one of the biggest shows in Europe. And there was a rumour going that a new BMW boxer GS was about to come out, and EICMA is traditionally a launch show for the big manufacturers.

As I kicked in to planning mode I started looking for Accommodation and connecting transport. The EICMA show is held at Fiera Milana Rho which has a few hotels in the vicinity but as I began to realise is miles out from the centre. Malpensa Airport is a fair distance out from the city too, meaning about 30 minutes by train or 45 minutes by coach. The popular coach service (they sell tickets on the EasyJet Flight) stops off at Fiera Milano Rho so that may have been an option. My favourite, a city metro service, is a strong feature in Milan and looking at the website it strongly featured a ticket to the Fair – Five Euro for a return ticket.

Then I discovered something called a winter schedule which is an adjustment to flights that airlines make in the winter for weather and passenger volumes. In the case of Edinburgh to Milan, it meant a single flight out every other day and similar back. So it would mean an extra day there – we would fly out Wednesday and come back Saturday to be there on a Friday. So that gave us a day for sightseeing, which would be an open top bus tour for as much as we could stand.

So it all shaped up. In the end I chose the Ibis Milano Centro to stay in, having stayed with Ibis or Accor hotels in Reading and Berlin. The price for the room was excellent and they had a package that included breakfast (and tickets to the roof of the Duomo). This hotel was also near to one of the routes of the bus tour, and included a shopping area which again was another feature to sell the idea to MrsL. It was also mid way between two metro stations, one of which was the direct line to the Fiera.

The trip was excellent, although my lack of Italian and experience of travel made it a bit of a stressful experience but the show was massive and a lot better than the UK has to offer. We liked the hotel which was nice and clean and at an excellent price, and I was really glad that I had gone for the “Culture” package that included breakfast. The metro was excellent, though like Berlin they confusingly have their Urban railway network under the ground too. The unitary ticket system doesn’t help either – the ticket we had for the metro got us on to the platform for the railway. The clue was the double decker trains though, the metro is single decker.

A latter discovery exactly round the corner from the Ibis was a small supermarket – which we discovered on the last evening and I’d wished we had noticed sooner as the hotel vending machines were typically on the pricey side at least in comparison. MrsL also told me that the local wine was excellent, as usual the local stuff was cheaper and of better quality than the export stuff we get.

We also had a good run on the city sightseeing tour, after an initial bit of confusion with the online booking I had made – you just use it on the bus –we went round both routes once, and then again and got off at the Duomo.

Other highlights were the ice cream shop we found round the corner on the first night, and it was a bonus that the chap who served us had excellent English. The double plain chocolate ice cream / fondant was amazing. Even on a chilly November evening. And the view of the Alps on the way in to Malpensa was a delightful if obvious surprise.

I’ll follow up with another two posts, a shorter summary of travel and accommodation, and a post about the show itself.

Over the last six months or so I’ve been assisting on a project to migrate some old software between data centres. The new data centres have Windows 2008 Server R2 and all the matching versions of SQL Server and SharePoint – not the latest versions but up to date when it comes to corporate land.

Part of my consulting support has involved regression checks of both source and running software in test environments. With the apps being almost 8 years old the support and test machines are thankfully virtual but date back to Virtual Server time. It’s great having the ready built machines available but Hyper-v has a few issues when working with the machines.

One of these is the additions – not the Hyper-V additions but the original Virtual Server additions which will not remove due to an issue in the original setup. And you can’t add the new ones until the old are removed.

So over to a post by Arvind Shyamsunder over on MSDN (Virtual PC / Virtual Server 2005 to Hyper-V Additions) which describes a solution – it’s a hack but it works. It involves modifying the installed installer for Virtual Server additions to remove a check so that it will de-install. Then you have a clean machine which you can install the hyper-v additions on.

ORCA is a tool for working with msi files which is in the Platform SDK – full details in the referenced article.

You will know from previous posts that I have used i2i Motorcycle Academy in the past (and hopefully will in the future) to acquire machine control training. i2i have had a website at http://www.i2imca.com/ for a few years now and have also been represented on social media for a couple of years. The i2i motorcycle academy Facebook page can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/96903591330/